Wole Soyinka’s “Hamlet”:

The Rotten State of Denmark Revisited

Antony Johae
Kuwait University

ABSTRACT

Wole Soyinka’s sonnet “Hamlet” is first situated in the historical and bio-
graphical circumstances under which it was generated. A close reading of
the text follows with interpretations carried out on two levels: transtextually
with Shakespeare’s play Hamlet and subtextually with Soyinka’s disguised
“messages” written during solitary confinement in a Nigerian prison. Prose
writings by Soyinka are referred to in support of my subtextual de-coding
of the poem. A theoretical framework for the reading is also postulated
based on a schema of intersecting vertical and horizontal compositional
trajectories. With the close reading played out, consideration is given to the
appropriateness of Shakespeare’s tragedy as archetypal template for Soyin-
ka’s sonnet. It is concluded that while there is neither generic compatibility
nor any psychological correspondence between Shakespeare’s protagonist
and Soyinka’s speaker, scrutiny of the political state of Denmark in the play,
and of the condition of the Nigerian body politic at the time the prison poem
was written, does point to similar political conjunctures.

H
amlet” is the second of Wole Soyinka’s “Four Archetypes” in his collec-
tion of prison poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972). The others are “Joseph
(To Mrs Potiphar),” “Gulliver,” and “Ulysses (Notes from here to my Joyce
class).” All four poems refer allusively to canonical works, both ecclesiastical—to
the Old Testament Book of Genesis—and secular—to Shakespeare’s play, Swift’s
satire, and Joyce’s novel, respectively.
Following the theme of the conference for which this paper was originally
written, “Strategies of Betrayal,”1 it must be obvious from the outset that Shake-
speare’s Hamlet would lend itself to, at least, a thematic reading along these lines in
whatever sense one were to take the term “betrayal”: either as treachery, deception,
pretence, or as illusion, or of all of these meanings taken together. The focus here,
however, will not be with the thematic configurations of Shakespeare’s tragedy,

•  REsearch in african liter atures, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter 2007). © 2007  •
62  •  Research in African Liter atures

but rather with strategies of deception at a linguistic level as practiced by Wole

Soyinka in his poem “Hamlet.” This will not rule out cross-referentiality with
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but will prioritize Soyinka’s poem as target text, rather than
giving emphasis to the source text—Shakespeare’s play.
Soyinka’s poem needs to be contextualized so that our interpretations may
square with the sociopolitical circumstances that gave rise to it. If we fail to do
this, it is unlikely that our reading will bear any correspondence to the poet’s
ultimate objective, however unfashionable it has become to attribute a writer with
an intention since Roland Barthes pronounced the author dead. Again, if we are
not to take account of factors external to the text that, as I shall try to show, will
be crucial to understanding, our interpretations of Soyinka’s “Hamlet” will rely
solely on its relationship to Shakespeare’s play; that is, an intrinsic transtextual
binary reading on a synchronic axis, whereas what I shall be primarily seeking
to draw attention to is the relationship of the textual signifiers to the contextual
signifieds on the diachronic plane of lived-out experience.
It will be worth bearing in mind throughout my reading that Soyinka’s
poem was conceived and written during the author’s twenty-two-month solitary
confinement without trial from 1967 to 1969. Soyinka had been arrested for pro-
posing, and attempting to organize, a revolutionary “Third Force” of democratic
elements on both sides against the leaders of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, who
had declared an independent nation—Biafra—and the military regime of Major-
General Yakubu Gowon, which had responded by declaring war on the breakaway
state.2 I shall elaborate on this circumstantial aspect of the poem as I proceed with
my exegesis.
Seen in relation to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the poem appears to plunge in
medias res: “He [Hamlet] stilled his doubts, they rose to halt and lame / A resolu-
tion on the rack. [. . .]” (Soyinka, A Shuttle in the Crypt 22). One recalls here Hamlet’s
irresolution in avenging the murder of his father, and the suffering (“the rack”)
this induces. Similarly,

[. . .] Passion’s flame

Was doused in fear and error, his mind’s unease
Bred indulgence to the state’s disease

Ghosts embowelled his earth; [. . .] (2–5)

recalls Hamlet’s desire for vengeance thwarted by his doubts (“mind’s unease”)
about taking such an action, or even the possibility that the ghost of his father may
be a devil in disguise.(2.2.610–15). His “mind’s unease,” which causes Hamlet to
prevaricate, while it corrupts his resolve, also allows the State of Denmark to be
further corrupted. “Ghosts” (5) may refer to this unhealthy state of affairs in the
affairs of state as well as to the several appearances of the ghost, the thought of
which has consumed (“emboweled”) him.
Thus far, it can be seen that Soyinka has not deviated from the import and
atmosphere of Shakespeare’s play; the major difference lies on the formal plane:
Soyinka’s poem presents in the highly condensed form of a sonnet a reconstitu-
tion of the essential emotional thrust of Shakespeare’s play, while at the same time
taking for granted the dramatic events that give rise to the action. In other words,
the events have to be assumed in a reading of the poem if intertextual transfer is
to be apprehended in any meaningful way.
 ANTONY JOHAE  •  63

We might pause here to ask ourselves why the Nigerian poet should put
himself to the trouble of transposing the emotional dilemmas of Shakespeare’s
protagonist to a sonnet of his own making. In order to answer this, it is first nec-
essary to bear in mind the perilous situation in which Soyinka wrote his poem.
He tells us in the preface to A Shuttle in the Crypt: “This volume consists of poems
written in gaol in spite of the deprivation of reading and writing material in nearly
two years of solitary confinement” (vii).
Apart from the practical problems to be overcome—obtaining something with
which to write and something to write on—there was also the problem of how to
express himself in such a way that those screening him would not be led into think-
ing he was writing something subversive or designed to send messages to what
his captors spuriously thought of as his co-betrayers outside the prison. Soyinka
needed a strategy of deception if he were to overcome this handicap, for he surely
wanted his fellow Nigerians to know about the injustice to which he was being
subjected, and how such arbitrary deprivation of freedom reflected the corrupt
practices of Major-General Gowon’s military government and, by extension, the
parlous state of a country divided by civil war. An evasive strategy might involve
the construction of a coherent subtext to be read, so to speak, between the lines by
the initiated, which would make covert reference to the prisoner’s mental state dur-
ing his solitary confinement, while at the same time leaving the surface meaning
intact. In this instance, the material of the source text (Shakespeare’s play) might be
used as a camouflage for the covert meanings of the target text (Soyinka’s poem).
We might test this hypothesis on the lines from the poem already glossed:
a beginning might be made by taking the “He” of the first line to signify, at a
subtextual level, the prisoner (rather than the Hamlet of the play). This will put
us in a position to reinterpret the other linguistic signifiers. In this subterranean
and cryptic environment, “He stilled his doubts, they rose to halt and lame / A
resolution on the rack. [. . .]” (1–2) could now be taken to denote the prisoner’s
determination to remain strong in the face of his doubts and mental suffering
(“the rack”) induced by prolonged incarceration. As Soyinka makes clear in the
Preface to A Shuttle in the Crypt, “it was [. . .] this level of the loss of human contact
that proved more corrosive than that purely physical loss upon which the little
mind-butchers had based their hope” (viii). “Passion’s flame” can now be read as
an expression of the prisoner’s anger at being imprisoned without trial, but which
is held in check (“doused”) because he is afraid of betraying himself. Furthermore,
his sense of vulnerability (“unease”) might give an opportunity for the corrupting
influence of the military authorities to corrode his resolve: pictures of what his cap-
tors might do to him invade his mind, the word “ghosts” acting here as metonymic
signifier for the visualization of the prisoner’s worst fears; or, as Soyinka puts it in
his published prison notes, The Man Died: “I testify to the strange, sinister byways
of the mind in solitary confinement, to the strange monsters it begets” (12).
Thus far it has been possible to discern a plausible cohesion between the
poem’s two interfaces: between, on the one hand, the target text, the poem
“Hamlet,” read surface-to-surface, and referentially, with the source text, the play
Hamlet; and, on the other, as covert subtext allusively interrelated with what J. O. J.
Nwachukwu-Agbada, in a discussion of the political dimension of Soyinka’s
poetry, has referred to as “contextual social realities” (87)—in Soyinka’s case, the
fact of his prolonged solitary confinement in prison and the mental anguish this
induces.
64  •  Research in African Liter atures

Thus, “[. . .] he clung to rails / In a gallery of abstractions, dissecting tales /

As ‘told by an idiot’ [. . .]” (5–7), while appearing, on the surface, to be referring to
Hamlet’s reading (“abstractions”) in the castle lobby in act 2, scene 2, of the play,
and to his making fun of (“dissecting”) what he calls “These tedious old fools!”
(line 221) (i.e., Polonius), at an embedded subversive level may allude idiomatically
to the prisoner’s attempt at stopping himself, so to speak, going off the rails; that is,
losing his sanity in the mental torment (“gallery of abstractions”) he suffers trying
to anticipate the pitfalls of the lies (“tales”) told him by his captors. At this second-
ary level, the apparently cited “told by an idiot” might actually refer to the lack
of subtlety employed by his interrogators, which should make it possible for him
to see through (dissect) their lies. The inverted commas placed around “told by
an idiot” make the words look like a quotation from Shakespeare’s play, although
no such phrase appears there verbatim in the script. Their subtextual function,
however, is actually defensive: the poet-prisoner’s strategy to deflect any pejorative
connotation that his captors might construe as being aimed at them, but which
an informed reader and ally would understand was directed not only at those
who arbitrarily imprison, but at the “collective idiocy” and “insane leadership”
(Nwachukwu 87) of postindependence Nigeria. In point of fact, the words “told
by an idiot” are a quotation from another of Shakespeare’s plays that, like Hamlet,
represents a nation in the process of falling apart following an illegal usurpation
of political power; namely, Scotland in Macbeth. The words are taken from Mac-
beth’s monologue of metaphysical disillusionment in act 5, scene 5: “[Life] is a tale
/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.26–28), and
may therefore also have been intended by Soyinka to allude to the bankruptcy of
Major-General Gowon’s genocidal policies carried out against the Igbo people of
the Eastern Region of Nigeria. At this dire stage of his incarceration, however, the
prisoner cannot afford to contemplate a Macbethean metaphysical futility in his
struggle to survive, but must rather deflect such thoughts onto the “idiots” who
hold him without just cause—onto those who make a mockery of the principles
of life to which he, the prisoner, clings.
Before continuing with my reading of Soyinka’s poem, I would like to draw
on an article by Jeff Thomson, published in 1996, entitled “The Politics of the
Shuttle: Wole Soyinka’s Poetic Space.” From this I shall develop, and elaborate
on, what has already been posited concerning the dual planes of Soyinka’s text.
Thomson directs attention to the significance of the shuttle motif in the title of the
collection, and which Soyinka, in his preface, glosses:

[Soyinka’s] poet-shuttle will reestablish the lost role of the tapestry weavers
from traditional Yoruba society, reclaiming cultural ground from the priests
who disempowered them. Tapestries were elements of storytelling in West
African cultures; they were used to tell the histories of the people, their lives
and deaths. (95)

It is worth noting here that the woven textiles of traditional Yoruba society and
the texts written by Soyinka (a Yoruba from the Western Region of Nigeria) bear
a direct relationship to each other not only symbolically, but also etymologically,
for the words “textile” and “text” both have their root in the Latin word texere
meaning to weave. As Thomson notes, the Yoruba weave their (hi)stories into
 ANTONY JOHAE  •  65

their fabrics as Soyinka has woven his into his poem, so that it is not fortuitous
that the loom-shuttle should serve as a guiding icon for the poet. Thomson
further remarks that “[i]n weaving, the shuttle carries the woof or weft (hori-
zontal) threads through the warp (vertical) threads” (94), and this would seem
to accord emblematically with what I have postulated concerning the two-fold
structure of Soyinka’s “Hamlet.” The surface text might be seen as the warp (the
vertical threads of the text) through which the covert subtext, the woof/weft (the
horizontal threads of the text), are then woven.
One might go on to develop an abstract notion of intersecting horizontal and
vertical trajectories as paradigmatic of the total situation in which Soyinka finds
himself: the static confinement of prison (the crypt) restricts horizontal movement
(though frequently forcing the prisoner into mimicking the horizontal position
of death). In his cell, there is not much that the prisoner can do—he cannot take
action (as Hamlet could not, even though he was not physically imprisoned) except
to read and write, when not prohibited.
In the foreword to The Man Died, entitled “The Unacknowledged,” in which
the author pays tribute to those who smuggled books into his cell, he writes: “After
the indescribably exquisite pleasure of reading, I proceeded to cover the spaces
between the lines with my own writing” (n.pag). (Could it be that the Nigerian
poet wrote between the lines of a copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as he was, so to
speak, to write between the lines of his own poem “Hamlet”?) There is, then, in the
acts of reading and writing, the possibility of escaping emotionally from solitary
confinement and of transforming a static state of mental entropy into a dynamic
energy-charged determination.3
Conversely, if one were to take Soyinka’s alternative meaning of “shuttle” as
“a unique species of caged animal, a restless bolt of energy, a trapped weaver-bird
yet charged in repose with unspoken forms and designs” (A Shuttle in the Crypt
vii), then one would need to reverse the value of the intersecting horizontal and
vertical trajectories: horizontal denoting the earth-bound “caged” prisoner and
vertical, the direction of his escape.4 In any case, as Soyinka goes on to say:

In motion or at rest it [the shuttle bird] is a secretive seed, shrine, kernel, phal-
lus and well of creative mysteries. Self-identification with this essence of innate
repletion was a natural weapon to employ against the dangers of an inhuman
isolation. It was never a mere poetic conceit; all events, thoughts, dreams, inci-
dental phenomena were, in sheer self-protection perceived and absorbed into
the loom-shuttle unity of such an existence. (vii)

It is thus clear that the loom-shuttle symbolism has not here been employed as a
trope, but rather as a structural device in order to facilitate a strategy of conceal-
ment. With this in mind, I would like now to complete my reading of the poem
and further test my hypothesis concerning the alternative vertical/horizontal axes
of interpretation.
“[. . .] Passionless he set a stage / Of passion for the guilt he would engage”
(7–8) when read vertically takes us to the turning point of Shakespeare’s play—to
act 3, scene 2—“Passionless” here denoting Hamlet’s coolly worked-out plan to
have the murder of his father re-enacted by the traveling players (“he set a stage /
Of passion”), and thereby to convince himself of his uncle’s act of regicide (“the
66  •  Research in African Liter atures

guilt he would engage”). In a horizontal reading, on the other hand, in which lines
7 and 8 are seen as covertly alluding to the conjuncture of the prisoner’s situation,
these lines might be reinterpreted as: calmly (“Passionless”), he prepared himself
(“set a stage”) for the suffering (“passion”) to be inflicted on him, or which he will
inflict on himself by going on hunger strike in protest against his incarceration
without trial; either way, it will be a form of martyrdom that will demonstrate the
culpability of his captors (“for the guilt he would engage”); “set a stage” of line
7 may also imply the prisoner’s design to make his plight known to the world,
“stage” here operating as a metaphor for world, as in “all the world’s a stage” (As
You Like It 2.7 ); or as in the lines preceding Macbeth’s “a tale / told by an idiot”:
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon
the stage / And then is heard no more” (2.2.24–26). Clearly, Soyinka does not wish
to be silenced forever and forgotten, which is why, under cover of Shakespeare, he
cryptically construes his messages for the world outside the crypt to read.
Moving on to the first line of the sestet, while “”ustice despaired” ostensibly
refers to Hamlet’s continued failure to take his revenge (3.3) and also, perhaps, to
his accidental killing of Polonius (3.4), it covertly alludes to the prisoner’s anguish
at the threat to his integrity. “[. . .] The turn and turn abouts / Of reason danced
default to duty’s counterpoint” (9–10), shows Hamlet going around in mental
circles, as when, in act 3, scene 3, he sees his uncle, Claudius, at prayer and reasons
himself out of doing his duty and taking his revenge. Read horizontally, on the
other hand, one can see the prisoner’s circular reasoning processes working out
strategies of evading what the military authorities require of him, because, in fact,
he feels it his duty to withstand their demand that he keep quiet about the war in
Biafra. “Duty’s counterpoint” here, then, has an ironic thrust to it that it does not
have when read vertically.
“Till treachery scratched the slate of primal clay / Then Metaphysics waived
a thought’s delay—” (11–12) brings us to the moment of Claudius’s and Laertes’s
treachery (4.7) and to the final catastrophe (5.2), with “scratched” connoting the
cowardly wounding of Hamlet by Laertes with unbated and poisoned sword in
what was supposed to have been a reconciliatory bout (Laertes to Claudius: “[. . .]
I’ll anoint my sword / [with] an unction [. . .] so mortal that, but dip a knife in it /
[. . . / . . . ] / [Nothing] can save the thing from death / That is scratched withal [. . .]”
(5.7.140–46; emphasis added). “Scratched” at a surface level may also indicate that
Laertes’s betrayal has touched something fundamental in Hamlet’s being (“primal
clay” possibly alluding to Genesis 2.7).5 Similarly, “Metaphysics” of line 12 may be
read as the first principles of nature and thought, which now assert themselves,
and which prevent Hamlet from further procrastination.
“It took the salt in the wound [. . .]” (13), although sounding like a clichéd
idiom, is used here as an almost realized metaphor, coming close in meaning as
it does to the literal wound (“scratch”) dishonorably inflicted by Laertes during
a pause in the bout, and which so incenses Hamlet (“salt in the wound”), that he
pierces Laertes with his own sword. The quoted “the ‘point envenom’d too’ ” (13–14)
is Hamlet’s exact exclamation (5.2.322) in response to Laertes’s confession of his
and the king’s duplicity, and it takes this discovery (and, no doubt, the revelation
that the cup that has poisoned his mother was meant for him) “to [metaphorically]
steel the prince of doubts” (14), and for Hamlet, at last, to literally “steel,” or stab,
his treacherous uncle to death. This final pun on the word “steel” accords well
 ANTONY JOHAE  •  67

with a reading of Soyinka’s “Hamlet” in conjunction with the play from which
it takes its name, for was not Shakespeare himself a player with words, a master
punster?
By contrast, the last four lines of Soyinka’s sonnet when read on a subversive
lateral plane, though obliquely referring to a pervasive treachery (as in the play),
are not here concerned with the overriding theme of Shakespeare’s tragedy, namely,
revenge. Indeed, in none of Soyinka’s writings does one feel that he is preoccupied
with seeking retribution from those responsible for the injustices inflicted upon
him and many of his Nigerian compatriots; rather it is the strategies needed for
survival that are of paramount concern here. “Till treachery scratched the slate
of primal clay / Then Metaphysics waived a thought’s delay” (11–12) might refer
in this instance not to his captors’ treachery, but to the dissimulation the prisoner
is driven to use in his hurried (“scratched”) writing on whatever he can lay his
hands on (e.g., “slate”); while “Metaphysics” could refer to the conceits the poet
yokes together to avoid (“waive”) any hesitation (“delay”) he may otherwise have
in expressing an idea (“thought”).
The “It” of line 13 (“It took the salt in the wound”) appears to cohere with the
notion of writing covertly in tropes, an activity that helps the poet prisoner absorb
the pain of his situation (“took the salt in the wound”)—even the most poisonous
of treacheries (“the ‘point / Envenom’d too’ ” [13–14])—and will aid him in his
resolution to be strong (“steel”) in resisting his oppressors.
Throughout my twofold reading of Soyinka’s sonnet, it will have become
clear that one can find no semantic correspondence between an interpretation on
a vertical axis using Shakespeare’s play as the key to signification, and a subtex-
tual reading on the horizontal plane of the poet’s actual experience of protracted
incarceration. Having extracted two such divergent readings, one might ask at this
juncture how Shakespeare’s play as archetype (bearing in mind that the poem
appears under the rubric “Four Archetypes”) might have formed the template
for Soyinka’s poem, for there appears to be no situational or psychological corre-
spondence between the Danish prince and the Nigerian writer. In the play, Hamlet
knows it is his duty to take revenge for the murder of his father, but “cannot make
up his mind” to do so. Conversely, for Soyinka’s Hamlet (i.e., the prisoner), revenge
does not come into the equation, in spite of the suffering to which he has been
subjected; yet he resolves to “still” his doubts and to “steel” himself against those
who have sought to make him weaken. In short, he does make up his mind from
the outset. There is evidently no correspondence with Shakespeare’s protagonist
here, unless by inversion.
One is therefore driven to eschew a merely microcosmic psychological
investigation and to broaden the circumference of enquiry in order to apprehend
archetypal commensurability. One might start by noting that as Hamlet was
exiled by his uncle to England, so too Soyinka might have had it in mind to exile
himself to that same country from where he had gained his bachelor’s degree—
that is, if he were fortunate enough to be released, or to escape, from confinement
at Kaduna. From his prison cell, England would have seemed to him a place of
refuge as, indeed, the English playwright’s drama was to serve as refuge for the
covert record of his time behind bars.
Rather than prioritizing the prince of the play and the prisoner of the poem,
however, one ought also to take account of the larger political context. If, in the
68  •  Research in African Liter atures

play, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Marcellus in act 1, scene 4), a
kingdom that throughout the action is shown to be falling apart both morally and
politically, so too in Soyinka’s poem, “the state’s disease” (4)—that is, the disinte-
gration of the Nigerian democratic body politic—is also a political one: triggered
by the 1966 military coup d’état and the abduction and assassination of the prime
minister, Alhaj Sir Ahubakar Tafawa-Balewa, the deterioration was further aggra-
vated by a second coup led by Major-General Gowon, which in turn precipitated
the unilateral declaration of independence by the leaders of the Eastern Region
of Nigeria, the formation of the sovereign state of Biafra, and the outbreak of the
Nigerian Civil War.
Although neither the larger political picture of Shakespeare’s Denmark nor
of Soyinka’s Nigeria is directly discernible at either textual level of the poem,
both political scenarios can be read into it, assuming that the reader is conversant
with Shakespeare’s play and with the political situation in Nigeria at the time
Soyinka was imprisoned. It would then be possible to see the political intrigues
and betrayals of Shakespeare’s Denmark archetypally replicated in the subtext of
Soyinka’s poem. It would be a case of the rotten state of Denmark revisited, but
for “Denmark” read “Nigeria.”
If, on the other hand, the reader were unaware of the political dimension
of Shakespeare’s play, as was very likely the case with the prison wardens and
those charged with censoring his writing, the poem would read like incoherent
nonsense: the words of a madman—“tales / As ‘told by an idiot’ ”—harmless,
innocent, and meaningless, and therefore fit to be taken past the prison gates.
The Nigerian poet was no doubt banking on this strategy of deception when
assuming the persona of Hamlet, who also feigned madness so that fratricide
might be betrayed.
It can be seen that in weaving the weft of his prison predicament into the
warp of Shakespeare’s drama, Soyinka has not only woven a text(ile), a completed
garment as it were, but has also fabricated a disguise designed to mask what lies
beneath the intertext in the contextual deep structure of the poem. Soyinka’s
utilization of the sonnet as genre may itself be a disguise—a protective trope—
intended to create archaic credibility by seeming to refer back to the heyday of the
genre in Shakespeare’s time (though the octave/sestet layout and formal structure
of “Hamlet” does not correspond to that of an English sonnet, but rather resembles
the shape of the earlier Italian variety); and there is a further built-in irony if one
recalls that the Elizabethan sonneteers more often than not chose love as their
principal theme, whereas the Nigerian poet’s sonnet is grounded not in captivating
women, but in the fear induced by captivity imposed by men. The employment of
the sonnet, then, can be seen as a subterfuge for what may be regarded generically
as a prison poem.6
It is worth remarking, in conclusion, that while Soyinka has constructed
his poem within the confining parameters of a highly disciplined form (partly,
no doubt, because of a need for brevity), Shakespeare did not include a sonnet
in Hamlet, although it appears that his protagonist may have been attempting to
write a love poem to Ophelia, but that he lacked the necessary artistic rigor when
it came to composing what might have been an English sonnet. That Hamlet is
aware of his own lack of skill in verse is spelled out in his letter to Ophelia when
he says to her—in prose—“I am ill at these numbers” (2.2.120), a deficiency that is
 ANTONY JOHAE  •  69

certainly borne out by the inappropriateness of the meter he uses: a diminishing

iambic trimeter instead of high-flown heroic verse. Here again we see a marked
difference between the poet-prisoner and the prince, notwithstanding that both of
them know how to act their parts, know how to tell tales “as told by an idiot”!

NOTES
1. The Seventh English Department Seminar (EDS) Conference, Université de
la Manouba, Tunisia. 1–3 November 2001. The present paper is a revised, expanded
version.
2. For a fuller account of Soyinka’s involvement, see Soyinka, The Man Died: Prison
Notes of Wole Soyinka 19–20 and ch. 23. The book was first published in 1972 by Rex
Collings. See also Johae 28.
3. I am indebted to Mounir Khelifa for the kernel of my horizontal/vertical thesis
through his discussion of Zahra Ali’s paper, “The Myth of Prometheus in Sami Moham-
med and Aeschylus,” presented at the Kuwait International Conference on Aesthetic
Encounters held at Kuwait Universityl, 17–19 March 2001. For a re-titled, expanded,
bilingual (Arabic/English), and illustrated book version of Zahra Ali’s work on Sami
Mohammed, see Ali.
4. For a brief provenance of the “caged bird” image, see Ogunyemi 65–66.
5. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
6. On prison poetry in Africa, see Ogunyemi.

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